[Yankees] are pretty much like southerners except with worse manners, of course, and terrible accents.

I can't go all my life waiting to catch you between husbands.

The South produced statesmen and soldiers, planters and doctors, lawyers and poets, but certainly not engineers or mechanics. Let the Yankees adopt such low callings.

It's a curse - this not wanting to look on naked realities. Until the war, life was never more real to me than a shadow show on a curtain. And I preferred it so. I do not like the outlines of things to be too sharp. I like them gently blurred, a little hazy.

Anyone as selfish and determined as you are is never helpless.

Everybody's mainspring is different. And I want to say this - folks whose mainsprings are busted are better dead.

Say you’ll marry me when I come back or, before God, I won’t go. I’ll stay around here and play a guitar under your window every night and sing at the top of my voice and compromise you, so you’ll have to marry me to save your reputation.